LWN.net writes: "A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and 'that is better for everybody'. Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come."

i'm fed up with having to disable compiz on fedora7 (shutdown problems) due to the stagnant nvidia drivers, and frankly opengl performance is pathetic

I was just wondering if you could elaborate on your problems with the NV cards? I've been running Gentoo for years, and don't pay much attention to the problems on the other distros, so I don't know what the problem with compiz, NVidia, and Fedora is. But it works very, very well for me. So, I suspect that it's Fedora related, not nvidia-driver related.

As far as performance goes, the 5200 is an antique now; I believe it was released in 2003. I have no idea how old that Intel chipset is; I've never owned an Intel GPU. Is it possible that the Intel hardware is just faster? I get about the same framerates in Windows as in Linux with my 7800 GS, and would never have said that the Linux drivers have performance problems.

I suppose I should comment on TFA: Much like everyone else. I plan to switch to ATI when the OSS drivers start to mature. I've been an NVidia user since I ditched my 3DFX Voodoo card for a Riva TNT, but this is a big enough deal to make me switch.